PHP does what it does relatively well, but it's a quirky muddle of a language and its design is very tightly bound to a CGI-style model of web development. Any

PHP does what it does relatively well, but it's a quirky muddle of a language and its design is very tightly bound to a CGI-style model of web development. Anything can be hacked around, of course, as Facebook has proven. But you could write Facebook in Bash or DOS Batch Language if you were willing to. But newer frameworks and languages that were designed with modern web development in mind are more to a lot of people's liking than PHP's style. Really, the best way for you to answer your question is to dig in and learn how to develop a webapp using Ruby or Node.js or Python and the amazing frameworks that are built on those languages. Dig in for a couple of years and then on the other side you'll understand better. You may still prefer PHP, but even if you do, I'll bet the PHP code you write will be better for having learned how the "other guys" do things.